Comcast’s bandwidth meter: Still vaporware

When last I checked on the bandwidth meter Comcast had said would be available to its customers at the start of this year, I was told it was still under construction.

It became a hot issue late last year when Comcast announced it was going to cap its customers bandwidth at 256 gigabytes a month. I argued that, if Comcast was going to put limits on how much bandwidth its customers consumed, it had an obligation to let them keep an eye on that usage.

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I guess I could live with a 256GB per day bandwidth limitation, but that still stinks. What about my Xbox & Netflix subscriptions? Am I going to be dropped in the middle of a match? One is penalized for “quitting early” from multiplayer games. Will I lose connection right in the middle of one of my daughters movies?

Comcast has a habit of announcing “coming soon!” and then failing to follow through. On December 16, 2007, they said “next year” (i.e., 2008), Comcast customers would be able to remotely program their DVRs via a Web-based interface. Forget to set the DVR to record a special show while you’re gone for the weekend? No prob–just log in and do it from wherever you are!

Here it is almost two years later, and we’re still waiting…. (There used to be several hundred responses to that blog posting, but for months now those responses have not been visible. Maybe there were so many the site software couldn’t handle it anymore.)

One issue may be that some folks have modified cable modems that clone known good MACs (theft of service – sbhacker.net / massmodz.com). Hence, some service paying folks will show BandWidth that exceeds their actual usage. Customer service will not know how to handle a call complaining about this.

Been to those sites, if you ask about service theft people get on your back and you get banned if you go on irc. Problem people are on Craiglist, they openly advertise and will even come over to your house and hook up your cable illegally and give you a “free Internet Modem”

It is unobtrusive, uses little system resources, and hovering over the tray icon reveals the daily and monthly cumulative bandwidth utilized. It was the only truly free bandwidth meter listed in the first two pages of my Google search.

Maybe this is what Comcast hinted at when they told us to do an online search, lol.

The problem with that app is that it only works if you have a standalone PC attached to your cable modem. If you’ve got multiple PCs, you’ll need to have it on each one of those, then do the math. And if you’ve got any other network devices attached to your network – say, a smartphone that connects via Wi-Fi, or a Chumby, or a device that receives Internet radio stations – you’re out of luck.

No matter how many times and how carefully we read the above comments.

Networx runs only on windows computers, and will only monitor computers it is running on. According to their own documentation they can aggregate information from multiple computers so long as they are all running Networx.

So my household has several Macs, several iPhones, an XBox 360, and a Wii.